What does Bonnie Blue – commodified sex object, patriarchy’s proudest product- say about feminism? About late-stage capitalism? About social media and big tech? About free market economics? About men and boys? About aspiration? We’ve had them all – gone 12 rounds on every debate, and rooted around in the nook and cranny of every argument. Bar one!
I’m talking about class, of course – you know, the one thing we really hate talking about in this country. But we can’t understand Bonnie Blue, the brand, without understanding the middle-class life of Tia Billinger, the 26-year-old woman.
She grew up in what she calls a “completely normal family” in the quaint village of Draycott near Nottingham, taking part in professional dance competitions with thoughts of becoming a dancer or midwife (until she was put off by the pay). Instead, Tia worked in finance recruitment for the NHS – owning a house and cars – until Bonnie Blue was born. First as a cam girl then as a…you know, I don’t know what to call what she does now. Porn film performer?
What would we call a working-class girl walking in her designer shoes? Because I’m pretty sure “content creator” or “adult film star” wouldn’t roll off the tongue when it speaks of her with quite the same ease that “prossie” always has.
Perhaps the struggle is because a working-class Tia wouldn’t become a Bonnie. A young woman whose lane-change – per the recent Channel 4 documentary, 1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story – into pornography and sex was prompted by an affliction, one that primarily blights the middle and upper classes….boredom. We see her horror at the thought of a nine-to-five.
Still, it takes a safety net the size of an Olympic swimming pool to quit a good job and leap off the top board. Though 50 metres is nothing when you have a house, professional experience and the feasibility of family support if it all goes, well, tits up. Which, of course, in pure capitalist terms, it hasn’t.
square LUCY MANGAN Bonnie Blue’s porn stunts make me feel old, but I know I’m right
Read More
Today, Bonnie Blue – born of Tia’s socio-economic reality – is a Frankenstein’s monster of Sheryl Sandberg, Kim Kardashian and a big-haired, outrage-stoking Maga wife. She has a staff (including live-in videographer and personal stylist), travels the world, drinks champagne, taunts her detractors, and has “millions in my bank account” for the trouble (she claimed to earn up to £2m a month on OnlyFans).
And she’s not the only one. Fellow OnlyFans “star” Lily Phillips – who grew up with Range Rovers and a Porsche in the driveway – has made a mountain of cash, including over a million for her own sex “stunt” with 100-plus men. Though, when asked about this, with delicious British middle-class awkwardness she said, “My parents always taught me [that] to talk about money is really vulgar”.
Inevitably, Lily speaks of choice, while Bonnie talks “empowerment”, while what actually both enjoy is freedom. The freedom afforded by choice. Something that only class can give, or take.
I know this because two decades ago, in my mid-20s, I was a working-class senior journalist on the men’s weekly magazine, Nuts. An £8m launch in January 2004 from one of the world’s biggest publishers, a magazine “fathers and sons can read together” (yes, really). By April, in response to, erm, impassioned pleas from readers, the no-nudity, no-nipple rules were ditched, “glamour models” embraced (and yes, you’d probably be reported to the social for reading it with a child). And I didn’t quit after our lane-switch.
You know how people ask if you’d rather fight a badger or a bear? Well, I’d grown up in poverty and with no safety net of any size, felt that I had no choice (which of course was nonsense and cowardly). Or at least, no good choices. The thought of moving back home, to the place I’d run away from, fast, was as unbearable for me as boredom was for Tia. So – for want of a better phrase – I swallowed it. For two more years.
And I watched the models – of what became mainstream soft-core porn – make their own choices alongside mine. How much to accept in payment, whether to demand picture approval, whether to go topless or cover their nipples with hair (hair bra!) or an arm (arm bra!). And became aware of the difference between the silver-service spread and the beige buffet.
There was the posh Big Brother contestant I stayed up all night bidding for, paying £40,000 just for the right to photograph her first (she did not appear topless). The controversial ex-nurse and daughter of teachers, Abi Titmuss, who made £30,000 a day in her lad’s mag career, appearing – to me – to receive a rare level of support and control from those in charge. Who were not just aware of her popularity but also knew she could walk away with some ease (as she herself said, “I studied Latin at school, I’m from a good family”).
While there amongst the vol-au-vents were the “real girls”. Amateur wanna-be models – overwhelmingly working class, desperate for an opportunity – whose personal pictures were used to sell millions of magazines in return for precisely nothing. They were sold a dream of “making it” but truthfully we knew the majority never would. As one of them once said to me of the options open to the working-class then, “men like my dad had boxing, we have this”.
And most notably, there was working-class Noughties-headliner turned Ted Lasso star Keeley Hazell who, in her corker of a book published just this week, Everyone’s Seen My Tits: Stories and Reflections from an Unlikely Feminist, shares that she had £1.63 left while waiting for her first page 3 paycheck. Had zero control over the pictures published. Wasn’t paid for her first magazine cover shoot. All the while reasoning, “All I wanted was a way out, and now I had it”, now recognising “money doesn’t just give you access, it equals choice and opportunity”.
Though not all choices are created equal, are free or are even real choices – whatever the third-wave and its get-out clause of “choice feminism” insists, conflating all personal choice within any structure and system with blanket empowerment.
Any dregs of the “empowerment” argument went down the drain – prompting me to finally decide to leap – the night I sat preparing for the launch of a new website from Nuts called “Assess My Breasts”. Chopping the heads off hundreds of women’s photos so I could upload them before we invited men to rate them out of ten.
Of course by then, after being promoted, I was financially middle class. With the choices that came along with it. And between me in that office 18 years ago, and Bonnie Blue today, lies the world we created. One in which porn – and violence, degradation, all that comes with it – became mainstream. Became normal. Now it’s a career of supposed “choice” for the Tia’s of the world, a girl of just five years old when Nuts was first published. The choices she makes as Bonnie, the freedom she enjoys only as much as that world – built for the pleasure and enrichment of men – allows.
Yet, what is true, will always be true, is what I knew that night sat looking at the digital wall of breasts. Behind every girl boss, every middle- and upper-class woman taking a healthy salary, playing subscription sites like a one-arm bandit, making the system work for them, lies the bodies of the poor and too-often vulnerable girls and women that the “business” is built upon. So yeah, why aren’t we talking about class again?
Terri White is a social affairs and culture journalist, author and documentarian living in the northwest
Hence then, the article about bonnie blue is middle class and that matters was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Bonnie Blue is middle class – and that matters )
Also on site :
- Man accused of placing pipe bombs near GOP and Democratic headquarters in Washington to remain in jail pending trial
- Aura AI Assistant for Unreal Engine Launches: VR Studio Ships Game in Half the Time with New Agent Capabilities
- Driver dies after plow truck goes off the road in Steuben County